Sunday, June 18, 2017

1946: The Lost Weekend

I'm starting to write this by looking at the list at the bottom. When this started, there were several movies that I had to sit through that drove me insane. I was really looking forward to watching Grand Hotel and Cimarron weigh down the bottom of the list. After eighteen movies, they really shouldn't remain in the top ten, and only a few places above Gone With the Wind. It looks like so many of the classic movies of the forties didn't win the Oscar.

So what was good about The Lost Weekend? It shows the dark side of alcohol (until the last two minutes, that is) and more of a reality of alcoholism. Perhaps it was one of the first to really do so.

A bartender has a pretty good line in speaking about a shot of whiskey. "One's too many and a hundred's not enough."

The best part is when the main character, Don, gets caught stealing a purse, he gets kicked out of the bar. The piano man at the bar starts to sing, "Somebody stole a purse... everybody!" and then the rest of the bar sings along as he gets kicked out. That was pretty good. I think we're probably getting pretty close to the having the technology to have similar scarlet songs follow around criminals

But I didn't care for Ray Milland. The Wikipedia article on The Lost Weekend states that "The film was intended to have no musical score, but preview audiences
laughed at what they considered Milland's overwrought performance." As far as I'm concerned, the score didn't cover his Oscar winning performance enough.